Blue Before Morning

A 19-year-old N.Y.U. student misses her bus to South Carolina and talks a hardened New York cabby into driving her there? O.K., that’s theoretically possible. They pick up a foulmouthed, pregnant, cigarette-smoking hitchhiker on the New Jersey Turnpike? Sure, that could happen. The cabdriver happens to have a major emotional connection with the exact city they’re headed for? Oh, please.

Kate McGovern’s “Blue Before Morning,” from which all three of those examples are taken, is a quirky, personable little one-act with a warm heart. It does stretch plausibility at times with coincidences and parallels (a three-way birthday match, for instance), but maybe they can be taken as allegorical.

It’s a likable bunch that piles into this taxi, and their back stories unfold at a comfortable pace, mostly through flashbacks. Ava (Kether Donohue) won’t reveal why she has to get down South in such a hurry, but it may have something to do with her mother, Eileen (Jennifer Dorr White). Ms. White has the challenge of making the least lovable character onstage sympathetic. And through her performance, you realize Eileen’s attitude isn’t completely her fault; she’s just spouting excuse-based affirmations she has heard on television or in group therapy.

There are nice performances all around in this production by the terraNova Collective. Ella (Jenny Maguire), who turns out not to be the most gracious hitchhiker, reveals some serious conflicts in the flashbacks with her unexpectedly complex boyfriend, Steve (Flaco Navaja). In some ways, Jerry (Chris McKinney), the Harlem-born-and-bred driver who breaks into a Beatles song now and then, is the most intriguing of all. The scenes in which he meets, marries and battles with Rita (the enchanting Phyllis Johnson) are charming, but that’s not all. Ms. McGovern’s dialogue even dares to raise the kinds of race-related social issues that Bill Cosby was alternately criticized and praised for talking about a few years ago.

On the surface “Blue Before Morning,” at the DR2 Theater, is just the stage version of a road movie with a combined parent-daughter and kindness-of-strangers theme. Scratch it, though, and the second layer reveals itself: the advisability of growing up and the widespread contemporary practice of avoiding it.

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